networknewz.com — Building a reliable, full-featured broadband router can be very easy and cost-efficient. This article is about building one for routing a LAN to the Internet with NAT (Network Address Translation -- Linux users also call it as IP Masquerading) using an old computer and a Linux micro-distribution designed to have very low hardware requirements
Feb 25, 2007 View in Crawl 4
robinator08Feb 25, 2007
You save the $50-100 on a router, and you surely will enjoy the amount added onto the power bill for running a full machine instead of a router.
livet0skiFeb 25, 2007
smoothwall?
6xddx6Feb 25, 2007
Anyone know of a good DUAL WAN linux router? I've used Xincoms and they don't work very well - freeze ups, etc. I'd rather have something like a Smoothwall box running dual WAN nics. Any ideas for a stable solution?
multitudeFeb 26, 2007
It will waste more electricity than you need to. Get an old linksys wrt54g (not one of the brand new ones), or a Buffalo router and put openwrt on it.
tenoqFeb 26, 2007
Interestingly, my WRT is currently on 83 days uptime and runs with 3 clients using torrents and one wi-fi client. Using the HyperWRT Thibor firmware, it's as stable as ever. Perhaps if you had 10+ users, using a PC might make sense. But for the vast majority of home users, even those requiring some fancy features, the WRTs really are a fantastic, low-power solution.
mrsteveman1Feb 26, 2007
Smoothwall definitely beats a lot of things available.DDWRT and the other embedded systems are like a half ground between home use and a real firewall, i fail to see what DDWRT is useful for beyond feeling 1337 that you hacked the router. Its not even very stable, ive seen it crash more than windows. The lack of a reliable bootstrap is a concern as well, lots of people end up having to short pins on the flash chip to recover those things. And, those little routers don't have enough ram to handle any real functionality like VPN or IDS, or real time spam/advertisement/website filtering or blocking, they just cant do it reliably without slowing to a crawl and crashing.If you want a real firewall either use smoothwall etc or a real cisco firewall, but don't pretend DDWRT can do all kinds of stuff it cant do, and its mostly stuff you probably don't need anyway if your seriously considering a linksys router.
hutectroFeb 26, 2007
This project is NOT worth your time i did it and it you are better off buying a routerif you looking for router software i use BBIagent ---------it is easy to use and it is freeware.it works on floppy and CD --------just google ( BBIAGENT ).
orkutsmorkutJul 2, 2007
cheapest broadband here - <a class="user" href="http://www.broardband.net/">http://www.broardband.net/</a>
squirlyblackAug 2, 2008
If you know the basics of networking and have worked on linux before, it's not hard to set-up you own router with and old pc and your favourite distro along with ipcop for security. But, like other people have said it before me there will always be a person to complain about the electri bill or that winds is better. It's albout learning something here, not falming. <a class="user" href="https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com/index.jspa?ciscoHome=true?utm_source=blog+commenting&utm_medium=media&utm_content=Google&utm_campaign=International">https://cisco.hosted.jivesoftware.com/index.jspa?c ...</a>
acetylcholineNov 15, 2008
Very Informative. Thanks.
xslyferApr 28, 2009
Yup, I've been lookin' for this since 3 days, so good, but I prefer to do it by using ubuntu or fedora .... you know big distributions